Zuckerburg hit with new Facebook lawsuit

Ok so is there anyone else out there who wants to sue me? Maybe someone I said 'hello' to once? Please join the queue.

Only a day after escaping the Winklevoss twins who had come back to the trough looking for more dosh, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg has been hit with another lawsuit.

This time it is Paul Ceglia who put up the original $1000 when Facebook was being conceived. He claims he is entitled to 50 percent of the $US55 billion social networking giant under a 2003 contract, and has emails to prove it.

The complaint, filed yesterday in federal court in Buffalo, New York, includes new allegations supporting Ceglia’s claim to own part of the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. He claims that Zuckerberg sent numerous emails discussing the terms of the contract and the early development of “The Face Book” with Ceglia.

“They’re exactly what you would expect between two people trying to develop a website,” said Robert Brownlie, a lawyer for Ceglia, referring to the emails in a telephone interview. Well that is what he would say. They are hardly going to bring emails as evidence of the two young chaps discussing if iPhones would ever take off.

This is where Ceglia’s account turns nasty. He alleges that Zuckerberg defrauded him, lying about the early success of “The Face Book” at Harvard University, where Zuckerberg was a student at the time.

Ceglia claims in his complaint that he contributed “his time, ideas, knowhow, and other ‘sweat equity’” to the start of Facebook.

Facebook lawyer Orin Snyder has a different take on Ceglia, saying “This is a fraudulent lawsuit brought by a convicted felon, and we look forward to defending it in court.”

Snyder was referring to Ceglia’s 1997 guilty plea to possession of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Carthage, Texas and was fined $15,000.
Ah those magic mushrooms they get you in the end, they can make you imagine all sorts of stuff.

Newswarped is amused at human nature – that the larger the pot of gold, the more ludicrous some of the lawsuits that crawl out of the woodwork from people who had any vague connection with the rag end of a rag to riches story.